Freedom?

Abstract

The members of Two Fuse are, artist, Fiona Whelan and sociologist, Kevin Ryan. They describe their collaborative project as ‘an ethos and a method of inquiry’ (p.vii) and have applied their method in the latest Síreacht publication (Cork University Press), a very welcome book series which addresses controversial issues in Ireland. A key component of Two Fuse’s method, discussed in detail in Freedom? is the engaged art practice of Fiona Whelan, which is informed by, and contributes to, what is now a critically acknowledged dynamic in contemporary art. Socially engaged art, as this is now termed, embodies a momentum towards a reciprocal model of value and away from an inherited rhetorical model of value in art. Freedom? makes it clear that any functioning civil society – civil, here, meaning belonging to citizens – involves a process of constant negotiation between such polarities, between power and freedom and how those interfaces are negotiated, in situ. There is analysis in Freedom?, but it is also a propositional text – for art, but not as we have known it, to have a role in social negotiation and to be a catalyst for those interactions to be named and made visible in specific situations.